A young woman leaves an airport to hail a taxi for an unknown destination. It is pouring with a rain, the kind of rain that drives away all human presence, and you can see a hint of fear creep in when the first taxi passes straight by without even slowing. When the second taxi also passes by, the audience begins to share her trepidation, and we suspect that this film isn’t going to be an easy ride.

Indeed, not long after we see an exceptionally violent murder, shot with an almost cruel explicitness. But it is compellingly brilliant in its visual realisation – the victim’s face being pressed against the glass of a window, her features being pushed around into increasingly contorted masks of terror, configurations of flesh that that we didn’t think were possible. We are fascinated and repulsed simultaneously, as we are with all the violence in this film.

Most of the horror comes from the film’s oppressive atmosphere, hanging like a dense fog over the story that follows, which revolves around a witch’s presence in a secluded ballet school in Germany. The protagonist, a new student played by Jessica Harper, becomes a liability to the school’s witch when she witnesses the murder in the film’s opening scenes, and soon she is desperately looking for a way to escape the witch’s clutches.

Lurid lighting – bright red, blues and greens – light the dark corridors of the school. Director Dario Argento has no need to justify their presence, they are simply there for effect, giving the film a nightmarish quality. It works well, particularly in the dormitory scene, where the white curtains are transformed by red lights into veils of blood, behind which a sinister silhouette appears in the middle of night – not wielding a knife or sprouting tentacles, but something far more unnerving – sleeping. Unnerving because the lighting tells us that the figure has sinister intent, yet our minds boggle as we wonder how it will achieve that intent through an act of such passivity.

Adding to the atmosphere also is the crashing soundtrack by the progressive rock band ‘Goblins’ which sounds as though it is trying to pummel the film into submission. The music has a life almost of its own, and the blind music teacher, a character who lives in a world of sound, reacts at times as though it is the source of terror itself. The music appears out of nowhere and disappears when you least expect it, shifting the film’s gear dramatically, and accentuating moments of tension tremendously.

‘Suspiria’ is evidence that sometimes atmosphere can be more than just a way of conveying mood. Sometimes it can successfully be the focus of an entire film, its raison d’etre.